Large libraries of wholly or partially synthetic antibody combining sites, or paratopes, have been constructed utilizing filamentous phage display vectors, referred to as phagemids, yielding large libraries of monoclonal antibodies having diverse and novel immunospecificities. The technology uses a filamentous phage coat protein membrane anchor domain as a means for linking gene-product and gene during the assembly stage of filamentous phage replication, and has been used for the cloning and expression of antibodies from combinatorial libraries. Kang et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 88:4363–4366 (1991). Combinatorial libraries of antibodies have been produced using both the cpVIII membrane anchor (Kang et al., supra) and the cpIII membrane anchor (Barbas et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 88:7978–7982 (1991)).
The diversity of a filamentous phage-based combinatorial antibody library can be increased by shuffling of the heavy and light chain genes (Kang et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 88:11120–11123, 1991), by altering the complementarity determining region 3 (CDR3) of the cloned heavy chain genes of the library (Barbas et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 89:4457–4461, 1992), and by introducing random mutations into the library by error-prone polymerase chain reactions (PCR) (Gram et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 89:3576–3580, 1992).
Mutagenesis of proteins has been utilized to alter the function, and in some cases the binding specificity, of a protein. Typically, the mutagenesis is site-directed, and therefore laborious depending on the systematic choice of mutation to induce in the protein. See, for example Corey et al., J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 114:1784–1790 (1992), in which rat trypsins were modified by site-directed mutagenesis. Partial randomization of selected codons in the thymidine kinase (TK) gene was used as a mutagenesis procedure to develop variant TK proteins. Munir et al., J. Biol. Chem., 267:6584–6589 (1992).
There continues to be a need for methods to increase the repertoire of possible antibody molecules from which to manipulate useful binding functions, including heavy chain and light chain immunoglobulin polypeptides.